Viva Pinata: Bright light garden gonna set my soul on fire
Written: May 06 '07
Product Rating:
Pros: fun, cute, open ended, good presentation, good voice acting
Cons: not as deep as it could be, surprisingly linear, some control issues
The Bottom Line: How I wish that there were more than the twenty-four hours in the day cause even if there were forty more I wouldn't sleep a minute away. Viva Pinata!
Around Christmas time, my wife pestered me to no end to get her Viva Pinata. She just thought the whole thing was just really cute. I eventually found a copy which cost only $35 (now it's priced at $30, go figure). I hadn't noticed many kid-friendly games recently and we had sold our copy of Little Nemo with my Xbox a month prior. My wife being the graphics maven she is, would probably enjoy this game even more, and I might even like it too.
Story
There isn't much of a story initially. You are placed on a run down plot of land and you're job is to renovate it. The more your advance in your gardening skills the more about the world is revealed. There's no real plot other than getting to know the different personalities and even then they are shallow. Fans of a good back story will not be interested in Viva Pinata. There just isn't much, if any, substance in the story department.
Gameplay
The basic premise behind Viva Pinata is you have to use your gardening skills to attract different varieties of Pinata. Your initially given a pretty run down lot and a shovel to start. You'll eventually gain more tools and upgrades to your existing ones to help you create more diverse features of your garden. Building your garden is one of the major gameplay elements. You plant flowers, trees, and other plant life. Meanwhile depending on the makeup of your garden, certain Pinatas will appear. The more attractive your garden is, the more likely they are to visit and possible take up residency there. This is all determined by various attributes of your garden. For instance, one Pinata might require a certain square footage of grass or water, whereas another might require a certain plant or other pinata to reside there first. Once you've gotten two of the same species of pinata to reside in your garden, you can mate then. That is, once you fulfill those requirements too. Once those requirements have been fulfilled, you send one pinata towards the other and they fall in love. The actual success of the mating is determined by your ability in a minigame. The mating minigame has you traverse a maze with one of the pinatas where the goal is to reach the other pinata involved in the mating ritual before the timer runs out. Inside chocolate coins and explosive walls can slow you down. Then the egg arrives and you have to wait until your baby pinata reaches maturity.
While pinatas vary based on species, there are also variations within species. For instance, sour pinatas make your resident pinatas stressed and sad. They can be tamed and later become resident pinatas. Resident pinatas can change color as well by consuming certain plants or berries. Finally, pinatas can evolve through precisely timed events like whacking a species with a shovel at a specific stage of their development, to more simple means by feeding a species a certain type of plant.
There is a pretty basic economy to Viva Pinata. Currency is in the form of chocolate coins, which you can collect by digging in certain parts of your garden, smashing junk, selling plants or pinatas, or mating pinatas. Coins can purchase goods or services in the town such as fencing, seed, tools, pinata housing, and help with your garden. It can also be used to bribe troublemakers like Professor Pester and his minions called Ruffians. They generally run amok on your garden and create a lot of chaos.
The basic gameplay flow involves teching up your pinata by attracting bigger and more expensive pinata species. Doing so requires better garden management and a good knowledge of what's involved to attract different pinata species. The farther you progress in the game, the more experience you get. Higher experience milestones lead to higher gardening levels which include shovel upgrades, better titles, bigger land allotments and various awards. The skills needed to succeed in Viva Pinata is more along the lines of good garden management and partition. Proper placement of fences, housing, water, grass, and common areas is critical for maintaining pinata happiness. While happiness can be recouped through strong financial means, preventing it is the best recipe for success.
Overall it's a good game, which is fun, accessible, and can be challenging at times. However in the end, Viva Pinata lacks diverse gameplay elements. Simply organizing your garden is all of what the game is about. And for the gamers who are really good at doing that, Viva Pinata becomes a very simple game. Some gamers will enjoy collecting all the cute pinata, but unlike a Pokemon type game, you can't really do much with them except breed them or whack them with a shovel. Overall, I really didn't spend too much time with Viva Pinata because it just became too repetitive with so few things to really do. What's worse is that the for the few things there are to do, so many of them are easily mastered.
Controls
My biggest beef with the controls is navigating the menus. There are so many different sub-menus it's tough keeping track of which button accesses the specific sub-menu you want. In addition you have to dig deep into these menus in order to accomplish some tasks. The dpad does offer hotkeys to your shovel, watering can, and seed packet, but the down button on the dpad accesses your quick messages, which is part of those various sub-menus. Targeting specific plants, pinatas, or helpers is easy as the controller is rather sticky. Still, you don't get any messages when a command to do something specific fails, like when a sad pinata doesn't respond.
There are two analog stick schemes, one is a simplified version which allows you to move forward and backwards along the Y axis and turn yourself using the X axis. It's a simplified approach, which really doesn't work well for gamers who have a few first person shooters under their belt. However, the advanced control set implements the right analog stick into the movement scheme and thus makes it more intuitive to move around the garden.
Overall the controls just aren't powerful enough to keep from being frustrating. I can understand the idea of making them accessible to younger audiences by keeping them simple, but eventually when they get good at the controls, they'll realize just how limiting they are. What would have been best is if Viva Pinata would have offered a more in depth control scheme, which would implented more buttons and allowed you to do different things quickly and efficiently.
Graphics
The graphics in Viva Pinata are pretty impressive. The vibrant color schemes really fit into the cartoon pinata theme of the game. The environments are pretty impressive and immersive as well as they suck you into the whole Viva Pinata environment. The animations are also pretty good as well. Each creature has colorful patterns and variations to go with their own unique movements. Sometimes it's hard to see your pinata injured or crying given the pinata theme, but it's only a minor annoyance when you factor in how seldom it happens. One issue I had with the game graphically is that it doesn't seem terribly "next-gen" in terms of its looks. Yeah the textures are a lot smoother and the resolution is better than the original Xbox, but the graphics just didn't stun me that much. There aren't "jaggies" so much as it's clear that they could have cut some graphical corners given the pinata theme.
Sound
The sounds in Viva Pinata aren't all that memorable. There isn't much music to speak of during the normal course of the game. Instead you'll hear some romantic music when two creatures are about to mate. It's actually kind of annoying at times because you don't relinquish control of your garden when it starts up. There's some other music that plays when your creatures do their first mating dance, but it lasts only so long. You're best to use the jukebox feature in your Xbox 360 dashboard if you really want to hear good music.
The sound effects are actually pretty well done. Each creature has their own unique sounds. When notifications pop up a sound notifies you but not scares the crap out of you. Your shovel and watering can each have a small collection of sound effects as well.
The voice acting is probably a strong point in this game from a presentation point of view. I really liked the sheer diversity of the voice actors and their ability to play their parts. However the way the voices are organized did leave a little bit to be desired. After polishing off one of my sad pinatas with my trusty shovel, I was quickly praised for the great job I was doing and how well I was progressing. Who's grading me? Tony Soprano? Jack Bauer?
Replay Value
While Viva Pinata is a sandbox game, the way to advance in the game branches out in a rather linear way. Meaning, in order to get more advanced creatures to visit, reside, and later breed in your garden, you must have certain prerequisites. In the end your population can look very similar when trying to "tech up" to get all these prerequisites. Similarly, in order to balance the different plants and pinatas residing in your garden, the general layout tends to look very similar. If it doesn't your pinatas tend to be very unhappy most of the time. So in the end, once you've completed most of the achievements, you're pretty much finished. Yes you can rework your garden a little, but it has to be pretty organized in order to succeed. What really keeps this game from really excelling is a lack of gameplay dynamics. Once you get the Captain's Cutlass, all you really have to worry about is non-resident predator pinatas, which are easily thwarted by a sturdy fence.
In the end Viva Pinata isn't a bad game, but it's not the type of game that will replace Animal Crossing, Pokemon, or Harvest Moon as great collectible sandbox type games. If anything, it just goes to show that the Xbox 360 still has a ways to go before it can compete with the likes of Nintendo in attracting good original kid-friendly games. Still, it's good enough to recommend a rental for Xbox gamers who might want to give this genre a try without purchasing another game system. While Viva Pinata may be the first in what might be a line of kid-friendly games for the Xbox 360, the fact remains that this game is decidedly mediocre. Yes it's cute and yes some gamers will enjoy playing it, but in the end it just doesn't offer the same diversity of gameplay mechanics that really offers up to a superior experience.
Create your own garden and more than 60 types of piñatas Use easy, basic tools to develop an enviroment that reflects you Regardless of skill level, ...More at Amazon
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